


by the silence he keeps

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, American Sign Language, Canon-Typical Violence, Curses, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Questionable Political Structure, Questionable Presence of Magic, Questionable Time Period, Trigger Warning: Andrew's Origin Story, political espionage, selective mutism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-03 03:18:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8694307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: This is what they know about the assassin: The newspapers call him The Fox. The assassin calls himself nothing at all. The first murder was eighteen years ago. There have been two hundred and seventeen since. There has only ever been one survivor.(This is what Andrew knows about the assassin: He doesn't want to be caught, but maybe he wants to be found.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [litams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/litams/gifts).



For the first time in living memory – he tries to keep that time short, tries to forget, but memory keeps him like a mausoleum: caught in the darkness between present and past, a lingering reminder – it is not the sound of his door opening that wakes him up. It’s the sound of his door being _shut_.

He squeezes his eyes shut and counts the number of breaths, slow with feigned sleep, it takes to cross the room, but there’s no quiet tread of footsteps. No hesitation at the board the always squeaks. No scrape of bare toes against the rough wood. No heavy displacement of empty space. No swallowing of anticipation, no hand at his mouth, no—

When he counts to fifty and there’s no further sound, he allows his eyes to open.

The room is empty, save himself, and aside from the closing of a door that on any other night means nothing good will happen, there’s no sign of anything amiss. It’s a bedroom – on the smaller side, and sparsely decorated. He’s been here just long enough that he considers it his but is afraid to call it that. – and nothing more. The shadows that linger at the edges of the slip of moonlight from the window are only shadows, and the only tentative steps across the floor are his, tiptoeing to the door.

He cracks it open and the light from the hallway burns his vision – Richard always shuts it off on his way to bed. He can always see the flick of it in the crack beneath his door, yellow to black, and he marks the loss of it with clenched fists and struggled breathing. Tonight, it seems, the light has stayed on.

It had been dark in his room.

With something akin to terror, he allows himself to acknowledge the warmth against his feet, the sticky floor beneath him. It feels too thick for water, and smells like a garage – rusty. In the light of the hallway the blood is so red it looks almost black, swallowing the yellow safety of the lamp like a black hole, and it covers his skin up past his toes. Slumped against his bedroom door, blocking the space at the bottom, blocking out the light, is Drake.

His eyes are open ( _look at me_ , the cold tomb of remembrance echoes, _fucking look at me_ ), but sightless; they stare up at the ceiling without seeing it, the darkness of them gone cloudy with death. His throat has been cut, but not cleanly – it’s a jagged tear, like something’s been forced in and _ripped_ , and Andrew wants to laugh but he’s afraid he might cry instead. There’s a smear of blood leading down to the floor from where Drake died with his hand at the doorknob. He can’t bring himself to feel anything beyond a thrill of victory, not even afraid for his own life.

Death is the only one he’s wanted to find him in the night since he was seven years old, so he tiptoes down the hall to the living room.

Richard is seated in his chair in front of the television, the low volume of a late night laugh track playing a comforting background to the familiar scene. It’s something so routine, so _normal_ – he sees this same image every night on his way to bed, ‘goodnight Richard,’ ‘goodnight AJ’ – that he can almost pretend the previous few minutes have been nothing more than an unusual dream. Instead, over the hum of the television and the too-loud pounding of his heart, he can hear the creak of the floor in the kitchen. He can smell the rusty tool shed scent of blood.

When he does come around to the front of the room, Richard is dead. This time, his eyes are closed and the cut as his throat is surgically clean – evidence of mercies that had been denied to Drake.

Another creak of the floor in the kitchen – it’s the room next to his, shares a wall and the same squeaky floor – and then a quiet, female sounding moan of pain, quickly stifled. He can’t help the way his quiet tiptoeing abandons him for an angry entrance. “Leave her alone,” he whispers ferociously, the same steel blade he digs into himself in the darkness to convince himself to stay finding an edge in his voice. The figure, dressed entirely in black in a way that makes it seem almost unreal, moves away from the woman he wants to call his mother in surprise. Bright blue eyes, so pale they look almost white in the moonlight, meet his from behind the clinging blankness of the mask it wears around a skull to disguise its features.

The figure does not move to kill him, though it’s obviously something he’s not shy about; they call him The Fox, named so for the creature that travels with him – Andrew can’t see her yet, but she must be somewhere in the apartment – and what the papers have begun referring to as the trademark ‘camouflage and quick wit’ that has kept the assassin free from captivity over the past year. He’s famous for murdering the outspoken opposition to the King’s sudden rise to power, eighteen months before (the King, of course, denying any involvement). He doesn’t come after regular families in the night, not even—

Cass moans again, low and pained, and it sparks a new fire in his chest. “Leave her alone,” he repeats, and the figure’s icy gaze travels from him, to Cass, and back. “Or I’ll kill you.”

A huff of air that might be a laugh, a tightening of the mask’s fabric that might be it pulling in a smile, but the assassin steps away with a shrug. It brings him away from the window, out of the direct glow of moonlight, and the sudden shadowing makes his form go almost hazy and intangible, impossible to track. He solidifies again mere inches away from Andrew, crouching down just enough to bring them to an even eye level – up close, the pale blue of his eyes looks even more electric when framed by the black mask. The Fox pauses, and keeps his hands in clear view; one holds a knife, dripping red, but they both stay at least eight inches away.

He looks Andrew up and down slowly, curiously, then turns his head to the wall – to Andrew’s bedroom, beyond. To the gruesome scene outside his door. – and shrugs one shoulder again. Then slowly, agonizingly slow, telegraphing the gesture with every micro-movement of muscle, he reaches into the many folds and pockets of fabric he wears and he hands Andrew a knife. This one is smaller than the one he holds, easier for a child to manage, and he presses it handle first into Andrew’s grip with only the barest contact of his gloved hand; he retreats the contact as quickly, and brings his hand back to meet the other, nearly a foot away.

Before Andrew can think to use the gifted blade against him, the Fox is gone.

The apartment is quiet in a way that means that Andrew is alone, or at least the only one alive, and he wants to grieve. He wants to scream. He wants to hurl his fist through a window, wants to destroy every single piece of furniture the way that the home has been destroyed – it might not have been perfect but it’s the best thing he’s ever known, and it was an eager nervousness that kept him from _calling_ the family his, though he considered it such. He wants to burn the entire building down and breathe it into his lungs, but then Cass gives a quiet sound of pain that means she’s _alive_ and all he wants to do is find the source of the bleeding, there’s so much bleeding, it’s all over his skin and his clothes and caught in hair and Cass keeps bleeding and—

The police find her tongue in Andrew’s bed with a note that reads ‘I never said anything,’ and Andrew finds himself shipped across the country with a biological family that he’s never met.

* * *

Even on nights when it’s open to the public, Eden’s Twilight isn’t loud like this – this is the over-familiarity of extended family, the yelling across an already noisy room and the messy way they exist on top of each other, overlapping voices and bodies. There’s only the thirty-one of them in a nightclub that the fire department has slated for a hundred and eighty-nine, but somehow it seems more crowded than ever.

Someone drops onto the stool beside Andrew, the rattle of movement the only warning before a body presses against his side. Renee smells like vanilla, and like the coconut milk shampoo that Allison buys. “Stop sulking,” she presses the words into the kiss against his cheek, and he allows her to hook her chin over his shoulder. “Come dance with me.”

Instead of answering immediately, he takes the drink from her hand and finishes it; she tangles her fingers through his as they watch the rest of their group display varying degrees of skill and sobriety on the dance floor. The lights are flashing and the music is pounding and Andrew can barely hear himself think; he is, improbably, content. “I don’t _sulk_ ,” he finally tells her; he doesn’t, but he does – so often Andrew is a creature of semantics. He doesn’t lie, but he doesn’t tell the truth. “And I don’t dance.”

Renee’s hair is dyed pink and black and orange, painted the colors of the people she loves most, and it tickles against his collarbone. “You also don’t do birthdays,” she needlessly reminds him of his words from their first year of friendship – Andrew does not forget (but sometimes, he _tries_ ), “but here we are.”

The tug of his lips is a smile, is a snarl, is not enough of anything to be either. “Go away,” he shoves her lightly with a hand at the small of her back, fingers wrapping around the curve of her waist to steady her to her feet. Renee is graceful, but she is also well on her way to drunk. “Leave me alone before I change my mind about liking you best.”

She hums an indulgent sound in the back of her throat. “Right,” and he readjusts his opinion from earlier – definitely drunk, not approaching it, because she’s usually better about hiding these hard edges. “Because _I’m_ your favorite.” There’s no need to ask her what she means because Renee has never been a patient person; she listens better than anyone, she feels and understands, she empathizes, but she does not wait. “I’ll send Neil over.”

“I’ll kill you,” and it would be lying to say that there was no fondness in his voice; Andrew does not love anymore, but if he did, he would love Renee. “And make it look like an accident.”

The fact of the matter is that it would be entirely too easy to do so. When they’re not drunk on dance floors and vaguely celebrating birthdays, the gathered crowd are a hybrid mix of government agents and police detectives. Their collective backgrounds range from forensics and law to medicine and psychology, but they’ve been working together in varying degrees for nearly seven years. Employed by the King (they are Ravens, technically, though they haven’t worked out of the Nest in years – instead they report directly to Wymack and base their operations at his Tower in Palmetto), their official purpose is a domestic security service.

Unofficially, and ever since their move from West Virginia, their purpose is to catch The Fox.

“Renee told me you were bored.” There’s no rattle of warning preceding Neil’s appearance at the seat beside Andrew – despite his otherwise lack of use (Neil is actually a linguist, which in Andrew’s opinion is almost the same as being nothing at all), he moves silently. Occasionally frustratingly so, since his sole function seems to be the inability to know when to keep his mouth shut and be quiet.

He shoves Neil away with a hand at the curve of his shoulder, thumb digging into the hollow above his collarbone to knock him from the stool. “Renee is drunk.” It’s not a denial or an argument, just a statement of fact – Andrew is a creature of semantics, which unfortunately Neil understands. He thinks that, above everything else, is why he can’t stand him.

Neil smiles and it’s all teeth; he smiles the wide and unrestrained way of a child, or of too much alcohol. It’s a contradiction from the way he does everything else – too quiet, too restrained. “Everyone here is drunk.” A quiet moment, and then, considering. “Except you.”

“And you,” he counters, because if he’s cared enough to learn anything at all about Neil over the years, it’s that he doesn’t drink.

When he blinks, Neil’s eyes are the same unremarkable shade of basic brown as his hair; the detective in Andrew notes with interest that they remain so precisely bland, even under the reflection of colored neon lights. The rest of him reminds that Neil is a nuisance, regardless of this single point of interest. “Nicky says the party doesn’t start until everyone takes a shot,” he offers pointlessly. “Well, usually after he’s sung that the party doesn’t start until he walks in at least four times.”

 _Get to the point,_ Andrew wants to snarl at him, but Neil might take the interaction as an invitation to keep talking.

He takes it anyway. “Guess the party hasn’t started yet.”

The tug of his lips is amused, is angry, is neither at all – Andrew’s lips tug, and he reaches for the shot that Neil has somehow managed to place in front of him. “Good,” and he toasts his glass against Neil’s soda, and then in the direction of his cousin’s familiar laughter. “I don’t do parties.”

He downs the shot and, two hours in, Nicky declares the party officially started.

(The party ends a little after eleven p.m. when Laila and Erik go out the back to grab a quick smoke and find an unconscious body slumped against the wall; it is Riko’s right hand man – missing, well, exactly that.)


End file.
